Cathedral of St Stephen
Isaiah 6:1-8; 1 Corinthians 2:1-10; Luke 24:35-49
I will not preach at my own funeral. Preaching here today is as close as I will come. But I’m retiring from office, not from life; and what I offer here is not an obituary, certainly not a eulogy, but a simple statement of where I have been on the journey, or where I think I have been, and where I am now. In some ways too it’s an account of my stewardship in Brisbane.
Through the years I’ve been told I have a way with words. I’ve been called a wordsmith and even once or twice a silver-tongued orator. In many ways words have been my life. In my early life, I was trained in language and literature, and I was schooled in public speaking. Later I was sent to study Scripture, immersing myself in the words of the Bible as both student and teacher, and spending time learning languages both ancient and modern.
Yet as I bid farewell to the office of Archbishop, I make my own the words of St Paul: “When I came to you, it was not with any show of oratory or philosophy. The only knowledge I claimed to have was about Jesus and only about him as the crucified Christ”. A way with words is fine if it gives voice to that knowledge. But it’s a real trap if all it does is mask ignorance of the crucified Christ and become a form of self-display.
In the Gospel just proclaimed, we have heard the punchline of the Gospel of Luke: “You are witnesses to this”, says Jesus. The Risen Lord commissions the disciples to be witnesses to his death and resurrection, and the Third Gospel is all about equipping disciples to be witnesses of the kind we see in the Acts of the Apostles, also the work of Luke.
Now a witness is someone who has seen something or heard something or both. The something we have seen and heard is in fact someone. We disciples have seen and heard the Risen Lord. That alone equips us for mission; that alone has equipped me for my mission as bishop in Brisbane.
In the temple, the prophet Isaiah sees God in the dazzling vision which sends him on his mission to speak of what he has seen. In a very different time and place, the same has been true of me; and that vision has shaken the foundations of my life, as it shook the foundations of the temple. As it did for the prophet, it has meant seeing my own unworthiness and seeing too that worthiness is not what’s required. What is required is the forgiveness of sin; and I have known that.
For St Paul it is the vision of the Crucified; and for the first disciples it’s the vision of the Risen Lord whose scars shine like the sun. The oldest and simplest of Christian creeds is the Easter cry of those first disciples: “We have seen the Lord”. That is where my ministry as bishop in Brisbane began and where it now ends.
To see the Lord is to understand the mystery of his Cross. In the Crucified, weakness becomes strength, as Paul says (2 Cor 12:10); the wound becomes a fountain, as John’s Gospel has it (19:34). I have come to see the truth of this in my own life; and from that vision my preaching of the Crucified has come, not with a show of oratory but a demonstration of power, the power of the Cross of Christ. To that my episcopal motto points: Sanguis et Aqua, Blood and Water, the stream flowing endlessly from the wounded side of the Crucified, turning even the desert of death to a garden of life.
As I approach retirement, I’ve been asked what my legacy will be. That’s really for others to say in time; and there’s always the danger of confusing what my legacy really is and what I’d like it to be. Yet looking back I can see four interrelated themes of my ministry in Brisbane which may amount to something like a legacy.
The first is teaching and preaching, drawing upon my knowledge and love of Scripture and listening to the ceaselessly communicating God which is the heart of prayer. Long after I’m gone I will, I suspect, be remembered as a teaching bishop; and teaching is probably the thing I do best in life. Preaching is a very particular form of teaching, where the focus is more on the God who speaks to his people in the liturgical assembly than on the teacher who teaches students in an educational setting. With an unillusioned eye, I can see that I have received a gift of both teaching and preaching, not for my own sake but for the sake of the Church. And I can see that there’s a mutuality in this: if I have taught you, you have also taught me.
Secondly, I have worked with the Holy Spirit to prepare the Church for a very different future. Stirred by Pope Francis’ call to synodality, I was involved in leading the Church in Australia to and through the Plenary Council, which has had its influence on the global Synod on Synodality. Beyond the Plenary Council, I also convened an Archdiocesan Synod which had to decide how to implement the decrees of the Plenary Council at the local level. The Synod produced fifty Action Plans, which are the gift of the Spirit and a charter for the future that lies before us.
Thirdly, I have stressed the need for the cultural communities to move to centre stage in the life and mission of the Archdiocese. They have long been exotic satellites, but not any more. The ethnic profile of the Catholic community in the Archdiocese and around Australia is changing quickly, as it is around the world. Much of the spiritual energy here is found in communities coming from places like Vietnam, the Philippines, Latin America, India and Africa. They may do things differently than the Anglo-Celtic majority of other times, but in many ways the future belongs to them. Most importantly perhaps, I have stressed the need for a new engagement of the Church with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have been made outcasts in their own land. A new engagement will have to begin with a new listening to Indigenous voices, believing that the rest of us can and must learn from them.
Fourthly, I have focused on hospitality, one of the greatest of Christian virtues. Having moved the Archbishop’s office out of Wynberg, I have invited the people in, telling them that it’s their house, not mine. I have lived in it for a time, and happily so; but it belongs to them. To the house I have also welcomed the leaders of other Churches on a regular basis, and Jewish and Muslim leaders when I first came as Archbishop. I was also keen to host the Holocaust Museum in the Cathedral precinct. The hospitality has extended to political leaders, some of whom I’ve had to dinner at Wynberg, others who have joined me in Cathedral House for roundtables over lunch from time to time. This was all about building relationships, on the understanding that we need to work together for the common good and that the Church, which may not have the power it once did, can still have influence, though only if we build relationships and partnerships.
I have done none of this on my own. It has been with a vast amount of help from those who have worked with me. If I have learnt anything in my time as bishop, it’s that you’re as good as the people around you; and in Brisbane I have had many outstanding people around me. Without them, I simply couldn’t have done the job. Whatever legacy is mine, therefore, is also theirs; and I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
The Brisbane years have been the richest of my life, but also the most challenging, even gruelling at times. There was the Royal Commission into the Sexual Abuse of Minors, the consequences of which continue still; there was the presidency of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference through those years; the drama of COVID and its lockdowns came out of nowhere; then we had the Plenary Council and its aftermath, including the Archdiocesan Synod; and I’ve been closely involved with Caritas Australia and Australian Catholic University at a turbulent time for both. As a bishop you could die of many things, but not boredom.
It’s been said to me that I’ve changed in my years in Brisbane. I think that’s true; at least I hope it’s true. The shock of the Royal Commission, the coming of Pope Francis and his focus on synodality, and the experience of listening to so many voices through these years have all changed me. Quite late in life I’ve learnt things I wish I’d learnt earlier; but that’s not the way God works. I look back on my early years as a bishop and cringe at times. The getting of wisdom is always slow and bloody, but at least it has begun in me before I die.
Early each morning, I walk past the photographs of my predecessors on the wall at Wynberg. These days I find myself saying to them, “Well, we did our best. It was up to God to do the rest”. I also think of what’s said of World Youth Day: that each World Youth Day learns from the mistakes of the one before and then goes on to make mistakes no-one has ever made or thought of. The same is true of bishops. Soon my own photograph will join the line: eventually we all end up a story and a picture on the wall.
There is so much unfinished business; there are so many loose ends. But if you waited to finish all the business or tie up all the loose ends, you’d be waiting forever. A writer once said you never really finish a book: you just stop. The same is true of the episcopal ministry. So on 11 September, next Thursday, I will just stop, but with an overflowing sense of gratitude and a quiet confidence that the Church is in good hands with Archbishop Shane in Brisbane, Pope Leo in Rome and God in heaven. Amen.